Generation X — America’s forgotten middle child — may have missed its chance to elect a President. Kamala Harris, perhaps the last best hope of those born between the mid-60s and 1980, was a Gen-X cusp baby. And Trump, who defeated the former Vice President at age 78, was the oldest nominee in US history and now is the oldest President to start a second term in office. We cannot fail to note that he succeeds Joe Biden, who, at 81, notoriously deconstructed in real time and in public in the June 2024 debate in such a way that the Democrat Party has not as of yet entirely recovered its bearings.
Biden’s debate performance was so bad that the then-president’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, was weeping and distraught when he called her later that night. But the writing was on the walls already. From Chris Whipple in this month’s Vanity Fair:
On Friday, June 21, 2024, Joe Biden arrived at Camp David to prepare for the debate. Just six days away, it might well decide the outcome of the 2024 election.
The president’s wobbly state should have been a flashing warning light. At his first meeting with Biden, Ron Klain, his former White House chief of staff, who was in charge of debate prep, was startled. He’d never seen Biden so exhausted and out of it. He seemed unaware of what was happening in his own campaign. The president appeared obsessed with foreign policy and uninterested in his second-term plans. During one prep session in Aspen Lodge, the presidential cabin, Biden suddenly got up, walked out to the pool, collapsed on a lounge chair, and fell sound asleep. Yet his advisers were undaunted. With unintended irony, one of them explained their strategy to me: “An early debate would quiet fears that the president was infirm.”
That evening, Biden met again with Klain, (senior advisor Mike) Donilon, senior adviser Steve Ricchetti, and deputy chief of staff Bruce Reed. “We sat around the table,” said Klain. “He had answers on cards and I was struck by how out of touch with American politics he was. He was just very, very focused on his interactions with NATO leaders.”
Ironically, because of the way Biden mangled the 2024 election, he is in part responsible for the sordid state of the present Atlantic alliance.
But what of Trump’s virility? It is a subject at the heart — or, perhaps more to the point, phallus — of his campaign to young men. Someone once famously asked the podcast-o-sphere: “What was the Democrat’s campaign message to young men other than telling them they are evil rapists?” Touché! Trump, by contrast, ran under a dark cloud of sexual harassment lawsuits; he ran against cancel culture. And since he won office, he has made rolling back cancel culture one of his highest priorities, aligned it with “Make America Great Again.” Three of his earliest political appointments have been men with sexual assault allegations lodged against them, including the statutorily-rapey Matt Gaetz, his nominee for Attorney General, whose name was eventually unceremoniously taken out of the running.
According to Michael Wolff, President Trump is now “post-sexual (thank the Lord in Heaven!),” more interested in Strawberry and Cherry Starburst fruit chews as well as bite-sized Milky Ways than in the fairer sex. Halleleujeur! He has also taken, like the authoritarian-manqué that he is, to dictating his medical reports. So we will probably never know precisely how psychologically unhealthy Trump really is/was. A post-sexual Donald Trump, by the way, is not the worst thing that has ever happened to the Presidency. Imagine if, in addition to the political chaos of Trump’s atmospherics, we had to navigate the level of womanizing that he exhibited in, say, 1992 …
But for those of us that lived through the go-go 80s and the 90s, it is impossible not to notice that Trump has lost a bit of his fastball. Just a kiss. A whisper here and there. The videos of Trump hunting after models in the early 90s are of a sharper, more focused sort of nocturnal predator. And as a Trumpologist going back two decades, I have some knowledge of the man and his motivations. Money; Celebrity and Power, primarily. The powerful fixation on tariffs came about probably in the early 1980s, as a result of the old Lou Dobbs “Moneyline” CNN show, which Trump used to watch obsessively, perhaps in between intermarital affairs? Dobbs — another sour New York media figure that was incapable of playing well with others — taught Trump about not only tariff nostalgia, but the horrors of NAFTA (of which he was not entirely incorrect. btw). From PBS Frontline’s Trump’s Trade War:
“He believed from the beginning that there’s really nothing worse than being laughed at,” Marc Fisher, author of Trump Revealed, tells FRONTLINE and NPR in the above scene from the documentary. “And he came to see the Japanese as laughing at the United States and taking advantage of the United States by stealing the jobs, by dumping product here.”
After the Japanese economy cratered, though, Trump would shift his focus to a rising economic power: China. The first time former advisor Steve Bannon came face to face with Trump, a significant amount of their meeting was spent discussing China, Bannon says in the film.
“He’s been a guy that’s watched Lou Dobbs for 30 or 40 years,” Bannon says, referring to the TV commentator who has long criticized free trade and globalization. “And the only thing he had formed as a world view was China.”
That worldview would translate to a winning campaign promise: “The message is very simple, is that, ‘the elite shipped the jobs overseas and I’m going to bring them back,’” Bannon says.
Trump’s vehemence on the subject of tariff’s can only be properly construed under the category of stubborn old man. Like Grandpa with the car keys — only far more feral and far less likely to concede a fraction. Trump’s idée fixe is entirely a product of his growing senectitude, the Wharton grad’s inability to let go of the tariffs, particularly when every reputable economist is against them (punctuated by the market’s daily rejections as well).
Tariffs — or at least the way Trump wields them — are blunt economic instruments of retribution. A projection of his own sour nature into the bloodstream of the global economy. Bilateral trade imbalances, whatever their particular causes, regardless of whether or not the nation is an ally, a geopolitical rival or a tiny sub-Saharan or Latin-American country, are to be solved with the sledgehammer rather than the scalpel. In fine, emotionally rather than rationally. National Review’s Robert D. Atkinson reflects this sense of resentment in his attack on not Trump — but on the (sotto voce) “globalists.” Always the globalists!
As if it were the globalists’ fault that Trump is in a full-on trade war of his own making against almost the entire surface of the planet. The stock market is tanking? Blame the globalists! 401K evaporating? Blame the globalists! “Sure, Trump is a unique personality, but he couldn’t have done what he has done if the globalist system was working the way we were promised it would,” Atkinson writes. “This is not to defend Trump’s actions, but unless defenders of globalization, at home and abroad, recognize that they screwed up by refusing to acknowledge that there were significant challenges and a need for real reform, the West will not be able to salvage much, if anything, from the carcass of the now-deceased system.” No, Atkinson does not defend Trump’s actions, but he whitewashes them all the same. Still, National Review — a publication perhaps best suited to another era — does not have a lot of maneuvering room in the age of MAGA. (Averted Gaze)
Millennials and Gen Z are certainly not clamoring for their latest copy of NR. Earlier this year, a survey from Talker Research found Gen Z and millennials suffering from burnout. Instagram, much? "Gen Z and millennials are trying to find their way in an environment set up by previous generations," Psychology Professor Sharon Claffey at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, told Newsweek. "What worked for Boomers is not working for them, and they are frustrated.” Perhaps that is why Trump’s chaotic style of governance — for now — is gaining ground with Gen Z, particularly men. We are all victims of social media, but Gen Z and millennials know naught else than the technologically seductive lure of algorithms. Gen Z young men voted overwhelmingly for Trump and it seems that they did so because he aligned his campaign entirely on the side of anti-incumbency. And, as stated earlier, he has governed with a sledgehammer, breaking the wheel of the previously established world order.
Perhaps the Democrats should take note? Not in the sense of governing with a sledgehammer, which obviously is not going to end well. But in the sense of taking bold, long-term Progressive risks. Because the Democrat Party is certainly in the throes of a generational revolt, largely because the Grandpas and Grandmas of the party will not relinquish the keys to their luxury automobiles to their grandchildren to drive at faster than ten below the speed limit. Faster reaction times are required for this new geopolitical racetrack. Nancy Pelosi — 20 years the former Speaker; running for re-election — is being primaried by a former AOC aide!! Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer seems almost tragi-comically unable to find the ignition to his vehicle. One super-early poll even has AOC leading Schumer in a hypothetical match-up, which is not so difficult to imagine considering Schumer’s inability to articulate his decision to cave in to Trump’s budget. From Politico:
The intra-party challenges are driven by a younger generation of Democratic candidates who are chafing at what they see as feeble leadership protecting the status quo in Washington. Their campaigns are not necessarily stressing ideological differences, but generational and stylistic. They’re channeling the burbling anger inside the Democratic Party base that’s not only furious at President Donald Trump, but also at the way congressional leaders have failed to mount a meaningful resistance. And they are coming to define the early contours of the midterm primary season unfolding nearly a year after President Joe Biden, then 81 and ailing, was forced to abandon his re-election campaign.
In addition to those who have already announced their campaigns, three Democratic operatives, granted anonymity to discuss private plans, said they expect other serious primary bids against long-term members in Massachusetts, Maryland and New York. They also pointed to several open seats — including two in Arizona and Texas that were vacated by members who died while serving in office — where millennial and Gen Z candidates have already announced their campaigns.
The single upside of the decisive losses that the Democrats suffered in November is that by the midterms the party will once again be the undisputed anti-incumbents. MAGA Republicans will no longer have access to that political lane. The Harris campaign tried, awkwardly and in vain, to claim that mantle and lost, with profound consequences. But midterms are unforgiving to incoming administrations, particularly those that have all the levers of government under their control already. Further, Democrats will also have the advantage in the next Presidential election if the mood remains anti-incumbent, which is almost always the case nowadays. A nation permanently anti-incumbent, permanently disappointed. Trump’s successor — JD Vance or whomever — will almost certainly not have the wind at their backs. So, there is that.
That is, assuming that Trump does not run for a third term. If he does something as brazenly unconstitutional as that, at age 82 with even further intellectual decline, then, well, anything goes.
“A new crop of Democratic candidates is trying to turn the midterms into a referendum on age and complacency in their party’s ranks. In recent weeks, Jake Rakov, a 37-year-old former staffer to Rep. Brad Sherman of California, announced he is challenging his onetime boss, lambasting the 70-year-old, 15-term incumbent for not doing enough when the district was engulfed by wildfires. Progressive YouTuber Kat Abughazaleh, 26, is taking on 80-year-old Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, declaring that the party desperately needs to ‘change the establishment.’ Saikat Chakrabarti, the 39-year-old former chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), is going up against former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, saying, ‘we are living in a totally different America than the one she knew when she entered politics 45 years ago.’” (Politico)
“The decisive battles in the Kursk region, from which Ukraine’s army has now largely retreated, show how North Korean forces adapted their once outdated tactics for Europe’s biggest war since World War II with lightning speed. Their first forays on the battlefield in December were in large groups without support from artillery, drones or armored vehicles, making them easy targets for Ukrainian defenders. By February, their large numbers, physical endurance and willingness to advance under fire were combined with improved tactical awareness, such as moving in small groups, as well as support from the full Russian arsenal of weapons, from glide bombs to artillery and explosive drones. They became more integrated with Russian forces, and when the North Koreans finished their assaults, Russians would typically take over their positions. ‘They kept advancing, advancing, advancing forward,’ said Capt. Oleh Shyriaiev, commander of the 225th Regiment, which has been operating in Kursk since Ukraine’s move into the Russian territory in August last year. ‘We had a company stationed there, while they were attacking in battalions.’” (Jane Lytvynenko, Dasl Yoon and Alistair MacDonald/WSJ)
“Sorry, I got distracted by the penguins and bad tariff math and poor economics was less interesting to me than imagining tiny little birds taking goods off of cargo ships. But yes, exactly. It was sort of this very simplistic calculation, which looks at like, okay, if you export a billion goods to Vietnam, let's say they sell us 2 billion goods. So you would just divide that 2 billion by 1 billion and you would get 1 billion and you cut that in half. So that would be whatever, like a 0.5% tariff in this case or whatever it is. So just this really sort of crude math that doesn't actually represent the underlying trade dynamic. But the Trump administration, basically, if there was a trade deficit with the country, they said, ‘Oh, you're treating the US unfairly.’ And just to give you a really good example of like why this makes no sense, I think a really good place to look is Lesotho, which is this landlocked country that is inside of South Africa, one of the poorest places in the world, not really somewhere where people are buying, say Google Ads, not really somewhere where people are buying iPhones, the sorts of things that the US exports. However, there are diamonds there. And so we buy a lot of diamonds from Lesotho in order to make engagement rings. So that seems like a trade imbalance, right? We're buying more diamonds than they're buying goods and services from the US, but it's like, we're not going to grow diamonds. There's no diamond mines here, right?” (Louise Matsakis/WIRED)